I have never been so relieved to see a signpost for a village with only three vowels in its name. After six hours of driving from Pescara airport, my partner and I finally spotted "Moscufo" on a weather-beaten board, and I may have wept slightly. The relief was short-lived. In my excitement, I misjudged the narrow lane leading to our holiday home and sent a wheel straight into a drainage ditch with a crunch that still haunts me. The farmer who helped tow us out spoke no English and laughed for a solid ten minutes. I laughed too, though mine was the hollow, broken sort.

The property itself, a converted stone farmhouse with a pool we immediately ignored in favour of the kitchen, redeemed the entire ordeal. Our host had left a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo and a note suggesting we visit the Thursday morning market in the village square. We opened the wine before unpacking, which tells you everything about our priorities.

That first evening, we walked to the nearest osteria, barely half a mile down the lane, and I committed what I now recognise as a cardinal sin. I ordered spaghetti alla chitarra with meatballs. The waiter, a magnificent man with eyebrows like hedgerows, visibly winced. "Qui, no," he said, shaking his head. "Abruzzo, polpette sono secondo." Meatballs are a second course, not with pasta. He brought me the pasta with lamb ragu anyway, and I have never been more grateful for someone else's culinary intervention. The lamb had been slow-cooked until it surrendered completely, and the pasta, made with a guitar-like wire cutter as tradition demands, clung to the sauce like it had given up on ever being apart.

The Thursday market became our religion. We rose early, which for us meant before nine, and wandered among stalls heaped with pecorino cheese aged in local caves, strings of sun-dried chilli peppers, and artichokes the size of a child's head. I bought a kilo of lentils from Santo Stefano di Sessanio, because the vendor told me they were "the good ones" with such certainty that disagreement felt impossible. We carried our haul back like pilgrims, already arguing about lunch.

My attempt at porchetta, that glorious rolled pork Abruzzo does so well, ended in what I can only describe as a structural failure. The skin refused to crackle, remaining stubbornly chewy, and the fennel seeds I had been so generous with congregated in bitter pockets. We ate it anyway, with market bread and more wine, and agreed that failure in Abruzzo still tastes better than success at home. The leftover pork became sandwiches for two days, dressed with roasted peppers and the local olive oil that tastes like grass and sunshine had a very successful child.

The village pub, if you can call a tiny enoteca with three tables and a dog a pub, became our evening ritual. The owner, Marco, remembered our names by the second visit and our wine preference by the third. He served cured meats from his brother's farm and a sheep's milk ricotta so fresh it barely held together. We ate it with chestnut honey and talked, badly, in phrasebook Italian about football and weather. He taught us the local toast: "Per amore o per forza," for love or by force, which seems to capture something essential about Abruzzese hospitality.

By our final morning, I had learned to make pasta alla mugnaia, the thin, hand-pulled speciality of the region, though "make" is generous. My strands were uneven, some thick as rope, others transparent as tracing paper. My partner photographed the disaster for posterity. We ate them with garlic, oil, and chilli, standing in the kitchen, already planning our return and arguing about whether we could fit a case of that wine in the car. The wheel in the ditch had bent something underneath that would cost us at the rental desk, but I would do it again tomorrow for another plate of that lamb ragu and another evening watching Marco's dog sleep through our terrible Italian.